Plots03: Which counties are actually up for grabs in the US Presidential Elections?

With all the talk of battleground states, how many of the votes are really up for grabs in today's presidential election? One way of looking at it is seeing which counties remained with 1 party vs switched parties in the last 6 elections. If a county has stuck to the same party across the diverse candidates over the last 6 elections, I think it's safe to assume they are probably not up for grabs this time.

With relevant data from MIT's Election Lab, we can plot the counties that was Democrat, Republican and mixed.

It is really cool that the population split is nearly 30-30-30. This also confirms the conventional wisdom that Democrats' base are urban voters, while Republicans primarily resonate with Rural voters. Republicans lead democrats 2212 counties to 382 counties, although the population % is the same (population density explains this)!

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